Copernicus Climate Change Service

Labour is wilfully ignoring that the climate crisis is at a crunch point

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Original article by Paul Rogers republished from OpenDemocracy under under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International licence. 

British chancellor Rachel Reeves has backed ‘catastrophic’ plans to build a third runway at Heathrow
 | Ian Forsyth/Getty Images

Rachel Reeves and Keir Starmer appear happy to pursue growth at any cost – including the destruction of the planet

Last weekend the temperature at the North Pole was 20℃ above average, taking it above ice’s melting point in what was described as “a very extreme winter warming event” by Mika Rantanen of the Finnish Meteorological Institute.

Four days later, things got worse still. The Copernicus Climate Change Service reported that last month was the warmest January ever recorded at 1.75℃ hotter than pre-industrial times. This is especially worrying since scientists expected temperatures to fall this year as La Nina took over from the previous year’s El Nino. We now face the worrying possibility that the impact of cooling La Ninas might be declining.

Amid these developments, British chancellor Rachel Reeves has backed plans to build a third runway at Heathrow, which climate campaigners warn would be “catastrophic”, and reports have emerged that she is also poised to support the opening of the giant Rosebank oilfield in the North Sea, which energy secretary Ed Miliband has described as “climate vandalism”.

Reeves’ drive for economic growth at the expense of the planet is a far cry from the strong green agenda that the Labour Party seemed to favour ahead of last year’s general election.

Labour’s apparent change of heart unfortunately coincides with Donald Trump taking office in the US. The climate science community is now braced for the impact of Trump’s newly appointed Department of Government Efficiency, led by billionaire Elon Musk, running a coach and horses through the US foreign aid programme.

Trump’s administration has also already started removing or downgrading mentions of climate change from federal government web pages – a sign that we are in a worse position than a decade ago after the 2015 Paris climate summit, when there were indications that the dangers of climate breakdown were at last being appreciated at higher political levels.

Now, one of the world’s leading climate specialists, professor James Hansen of Columbia University, says that the international target agreed upon at the Paris summit of limiting global temperature rises to 2℃ is “dead”. The pace of global heating had been “significantly underestimated”, he explained.

The fossil carbon states and corporations with their coal, oil and gas markets, meanwhile, are more certain about their prospects and happy to promote their wares with enthusiasm. There were 2,500 oil, gas and coal lobbyists at the 2023 Dubai COP28 climate summit, four times as many as attended the previous year in Egypt.

If forced onto the defensive, fossil fuel giants have several options. One is to move the focus away from mitigation to adaptation, another is to boost the potential of carbon capture and storage, and yet another is geoengineering.

Then, if all else fails they can fall back on direct air capture; removing carbon from the air once it is dispersed in the atmosphere, rather than as it is emitted. In other words, we should accept the likelihood of an “overshoot” of carbon emissions and hope that future technologies can save the day!

None of these scenarios has any current relevance as none can be developed in anything remotely like the time available given the speed of climate breakdown. There has to be urgent political change at the highest level to engage in emergency decarbonisation.

At a lower level, there is some good news at least. The cost of producing electricity from renewable sources is continuing to fall and the whole process of embracing renewables could accelerate if just one or two countries demonstrated just how quickly change can come.

The UK is in a hugely favoured position to do so, having huge scope to expand land-based wind and solar power as well as offshore wind. That should be one of the British government’s two absolute priorities, the other being a rapid programme of home and workplace insulation.

Further moves would be an immediate tightening up of house building regulations requiring much higher levels of insulation together with grants and loans for home environmental improvements. Transition to electrical vehicles should be accelerated along with much expansion of public transport.

Changes in agriculture must be brought in to cut down on greenhouse gas emissions, with methane emission control frequently being overlooked. Air and marine transport must also be subject to far greater emissions control. Any plans to expand existing airports must be abandoned as nonsensical, and subsidies for oil and gas production should be transferred to renewables.

All this, and much more, would cost money, and a lot of it, but there is plenty of that around, readily available from many sources including rigorous control of tax evasion and avoidance, together with new wealth taxes. If climate breakdown is recognised for what it is, the greatest threat to UK security, then the entire ‘defence’ budget should be rethought in this light. More than this, any government that recognises the challenge facing every one of us would see the need to borrow to help fund the response.

So, what of Labour so far? Regrettably, there is little to applaud despite the efforts of a rather isolated few on the front benches and a handful of backbenchers such as Clive Lewis. The party’s brave words of a year ago are difficult to find and Labour is now about growth at almost any cost – destruction of the planet included. The lobby brigade is winning.

Even carbon capture and nuclear power are now hailed by the Labour government as part of the answer even though the first is unproven and the second will take decades to bring in while we only have years, not decades, to make the change.

Perhaps Labour will come to its senses as climate disasters accelerate but it is now a party that has lost any sense of mission. It has forgotten its history, how a Labour government of the late 1940s took on seemingly impossible tasks and succeeded in many respects against the odds. Can the party change now? Perhaps, but don’t hold your breath.

Original article by Paul Rogers republished from OpenDemocracy under under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International licence. 

Keir Starmer, Angela Rayner and Rachel Reeves wear the uniform of the rich and powerful. They have all had clothes bought for them by multi-millionaire Labour donor Lord Alli. CORRECTION: It appears that Rachel Reeves clothing was provided by Juliet Rosenfeld.
Keir Starmer, Angela Rayner and Rachel Reeves wear the uniform of the rich and powerful. They have all had clothes bought for them by multi-millionaire Labour donor Lord Alli. CORRECTION: It appears that Rachel Reeves clothing was provided by Juliet Rosenfeld.
Continue ReadingLabour is wilfully ignoring that the climate crisis is at a crunch point

‘Time for Urgent Action Is Right Now’: Summer 2024 Was Hottest on Record

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Original article by Jake Johnson republished from Common Dreams under a CC licence.

People try to protect themselves from the sun and cool off in Najaf, Iraq on August 20, 2024. (Photo: Karar Essa/Anadolu via Getty Images)

“If you keep doing the same thing, you cannot expect to get any different result,” said the director of the Copernicus Climate Change Service. “Unless we limit greenhouse gases, we will only see an exacerbation of these temperatures.”

Scientists with the European Union’s climate service said Friday that Earth experienced its hottest summer on record for the second consecutive year in 2024 as unprecedented and deadly heatwaves scorched large swaths of the planet, intensifying the urgency of large-scale policy changes to phase out the fossil fuels that are driving temperatures to alarming new heights.

The Copernicus Climate Change Service (C3S) said the three-month period between June and August saw global-average temperatures that were 0.69°C, or 33.24°F, higher than the average summer temperatures seen from 1991 to 2020.

“During the past three months of 2024, the globe has experienced the hottest June and August, the hottest day on record, and the hottest boreal summer on record,” said C3S deputy director Samantha Burgess. “This string of record temperatures is increasing the likelihood of 2024 being the hottest year on record.”

“The temperature-related extreme events witnessed this summer will only become more intense, with more devastating consequences for people and the planet, unless we take urgent action to reduce greenhouse gas emissions,” Burgess added.

Temperatures in Europe were 1.54°C, or 34.77°F, above the 1991-2020 average, a record temperature surge that had deadly consequences in Greece, Italy, and other nations.

But The Washington Post‘s Sarah Kaplan noted that the consequences of the record-shattering summer heat “were felt by people on every continent, from world-class athletes competing in the Paris Olympics to refugees fleeing from wars.”

She continued:

Wildfires fueled by heat and drought raged through the Brazilian Pantanal, a vital wetland known to store vast amounts of carbon. A turbocharged monsoon triggered landslides that killed hundreds of people in India’s Kerala state. The Atlantic Ocean saw its earliest Category 5 hurricane on record, while deadly floods have wreaked havoc from Italy to Pakistan to Nigeria to China.”

It was a summer of unrelenting humidity and heat too extreme for the human body to withstand. In June, at least 1,300 pilgrims visiting the Muslim holy city of Mecca died amid temperatures of 50 degrees Celsius (122 degrees Fahrenheit). Another 125 people were reported dead in Mexico during a July streak of exceedingly hot nights that researchers say was made 200 times as likely because of climate change. And in the Arctic archipelago of Svalbard, one of the world’s northernmost inhabited areas, August temperatures soared more than 2.5 degrees Celsius (4.5 degrees Fahrenheit) above the previous record.

Carlo Buontempo, the director of C3S, told the Post that “if you keep doing the same thing, you cannot expect to get any different result.”

“Unless we limit greenhouse gases,” Buontempo added, “we will only see an exacerbation of these temperatures.”

Original article by Jake Johnson republished from Common Dreams under a CC licence.

Continue Reading‘Time for Urgent Action Is Right Now’: Summer 2024 Was Hottest on Record

13 Months of Record-Smashing Heat Called ‘Another Red Alert’ for Humanity

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Original article by BRETT WILKINS republished from Common Dreams under Creative Commons (CC BY-NC-ND 3.0).

Rescuers carry away a man, affected by the scorching heat, on a stretcher as Muslim pilgrims arrive to perform the symbolic “stoning of the devil” ritual as part of the Hajj pilgrimage in Mina, Saudi Arabia on June 16, 2024. (Photo: Fadel Senna/AFP via Getty Images)

“This alarming record underlines the need to urgently phase out fossil fuels, and to hugely increase climate finance,” said one campaigner.

Scientists on Monday underscored the urgent need to accelerate the transition from fossil fuels to renewable energy following the publication of data from the European Union’s climate change monitor showing that last month was the hottest June ever recorded and that 2024 is likely to be the planet’s hottest year on record.

Each month since June 2023 has been the hottest since records have been kept, the European Union’s Copernicus Climate Change Service (C3S) said last week in its latest monthly bulletin.

According to the agency, June “was 1.50°C above the estimated June average for 1850-1900, the designated preindustrial reference period, making it the 12th consecutive month to reach or break the 1.5°C threshold.”

“European temperatures were most above average over southeast regions and Turkey, but near or below average over western Europe, Iceland, and northwestern Russia,” C3S noted. “Outside Europe, temperatures were most above average over eastern Canada, the western United States and Mexico, Brazil, northern Siberia, the Middle East, northern Africa, and western Antarctica.”

“Temperatures were below average over the eastern equatorial Pacific, indicating a developing La Niña, but air temperatures over the ocean remained at an unusually high level over many regions,” the agency added.

C3S Director Carlo Buontempo said in a statement Monday that “even if this specific streak of extremes ends at some point, we are bound to see new records being broken as the climate continues to warm.”

“This is inevitable unless we stop adding greenhouse gases into the atmosphere and the oceans,” he stressed.

In an interview with The Associated Press published Monday, C3S climate scientist Nicolas Julien called the new data “a stark warning that we are getting closer to this very important limit set by the Paris agreement.”

“The global temperature continues to increase,” he added. “It has at a rapid pace.”

Zeke Hausfather, a researcher at the California-based nonprofit Berkeley Earth, told Reuters, “I now estimate that there is an approximately 95% chance that 2024 beats 2023 to be the warmest year since global surface temperature records began in the mid-1800s.”

As Reuters reported Monday:

The changed climate has already unleashed disastrous consequences around the world in 2024. More than 1,000 people died in fierce heat during the Hajj pilgrimage last month. Heat deaths were recorded in New Dehli, which endured an unprecedentedly long heatwave, and amongst tourists in Greece.

“This is not good news at all,” Aditi Mukherji, who co-authored the most recent Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) report, told The Guardian.

“We know that extreme events increase with every increment of global warming,” she added, “and at 1.5°C, we witnessed some of the hottest extremes this year.”

The Guardian surveyed hundreds of IPCC authors earlier this year. Three-quarters of them said they expect Earth to heat by at least 2.5°C by the end of this century. Half of the surveyed scientists expect temperatures to rise above 3°C by 2100.

“It is a crisis,” said Mukherji, and one that has a clear solution, given that burning fossil fuels is the leading cause of global heating.

Antonia Juhasz, a senior researcher on fossil fuels at Human Rights Watch, told Nation of Change that “as a result of the burning of fossil fuels, heatwaves are becoming more common, and intense heatwaves are more frequent.”

“We can break the cycle, we can make oil companies stop burning fossil fuels,” she added.

Reacting to the latest C3S data, Amnesty International climate adviser Ann Harrison said on social media that “this alarming record underlines the need to urgently phase out fossil fuels, and to hugely increase climate finance.”

Original article by BRETT WILKINS republished from Common Dreams under Creative Commons (CC BY-NC-ND 3.0).

Continue Reading13 Months of Record-Smashing Heat Called ‘Another Red Alert’ for Humanity

‘Five-Alarm Fire’ as Global Temps Breach 2°C Threshold

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Canadian wildfire 2023
Canadian wildfire 2023

Original article by OLIVIA ROSANE republished from Common Dreams under Creative Commons (CC BY-NC-ND 3.0). 

While scientists were quick to point out that this was just a daily anomaly, not a permanent shift, it is a “canary in the coalmine” that “underscores the urgency of tackling greenhouse gas emissions.”

Global temperatures surpassed 2°C above preindustrial levels for the first time Friday, according to preliminary data from the European Union’s Copernicus Climate Change Service.

The European Centre for Medium-Range Weather Forecasts’ ERA5 data set showed global service air temperatures rising 2.07°C above the 1850-1900 average on Friday and 2.06°C above that average on Saturday, the service said.

“This is a five-alarm fire for humanity,” the group Climate Defiance tweeted in response to the figures.

In the 2015 Paris agreement, world leaders set out to keep warming to “well-below” 2°C above preindustrial levels. Allowing warming to breach that point increases several climate risks, according to the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC): 2°C of warming compared with 1.5°C would raise sea levels by an additional 0.1 meters by 2100, destroy 99% of coral reefs instead of 70% to 90%, and expose several hundred million more people to poverty and climate-related hazards by 2050.

Friday’s 2°C breach was first noted by Copernicus Climate Change Service deputy director Samantha Burgess on social media Sunday. She said the day was also 1.17°C above the 1991-2020 average, making it the warmest November 17 on record.

Scientists were quick to point out that this doesn’t mean global heating has breached the 2°C threshold long-term.

“The 1.5°C and 2°C warming thresholds have been defined in terms of the trend line,” University of Pennsylvania climate scientist Michael Mann tweeted. “Not individual years, let alone months, weeks, or days (the shorter the time period, the larger the random fluctuations). Those who imply otherwise are misleading you.”

Richard Allan, professor of climate science at the University of Reading in the U.K., told CNN that it was “entirely expected that single days will surpass 2°C above preindustrial well before the actual 2°C target is breached over many years.”

“We are blowing past warning signs with wild abandon. We are approaching the precipice and flooring the gas.”

That said, the reading was a “canary in the coalmine” that “underscores the urgency of tackling greenhouse gas emissions,” Allan said.

It also comes in a year of dropping canaries: The 12 months from November 2022 to October 2023 were the 12 hottest on record, according to a Climate Central analysis. 2023 saw the hottest Northern Hemisphere summer on record, the hottest month in July, and is likely to be the hottest year not just since record-keeping began, but in the last 125,000 years. And it’s not just numbers. The record-breaking temperatures fueled deadly heatwaves, wildfires, and floods around the world.

“The indicators are flashing red,” Climate Defiance wrote. “The planet’s vital signs are clear. Humanity is on life support. With the El Niño cycle just beginning, this 2°C breach sadly represents not a climax but a small taste of what is to come.”

“This is happening faster than expected,” the group continued. “We are blowing past warning signs with wild abandon. We are approaching the precipice and flooring the gas. This is madness. Utter madness.”

The 2°C breach comes a little less than two weeks from the start of the next United Nations Climate Change Conference in the United Arab Emirates. A recent report from U.N. Climate Change found that national plans were still incompatible with limiting warming to 1.5°C and that world leaders must take “bold strides forward” at the conference “to get on track.” More than 650 scientists have signed a letter to President Joe Biden urging him to back a fossil-fuel phaseout at the talks.

“It’s just one day (so far) above 2°C, but it highlights again that the world is approaching the limits set out by the Paris Agreement,” IPCC scientist Ed Hawkins tweeted. “We already have many of the solutions to rapidly reduce emissions and halt the rise in global temperatures. We just need to choose to use them.”

Original article by OLIVIA ROSANE republished from Common Dreams under Creative Commons (CC BY-NC-ND 3.0). 

Continue Reading‘Five-Alarm Fire’ as Global Temps Breach 2°C Threshold

After ‘Mind-Blowing’ September, 2023 Set to Be Hottest Year on Record: EU Climate Agency

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Original article by JAKE JOHNSON republished from Common Dreams under Creative Commons (CC BY-NC-ND 3.0). 

Scientists protest at UK Parliament 5 September 2023.
Scientists protest at UK Parliament 5 September 2023.

“The unprecedented temperatures for the time of year observed in September—following a record summer—have broken records by an extraordinary amount.”

Europe’s Copernicus Climate Change Service said Thursday that 2023 is on track to be the hottest year ever recorded following a string of scorching months, including an unusually warm September that stunned scientists.

Copernicus director Carlo Buontempo toldThe Associated Press that September was “just mindblowing” and that he has “never seen anything like that in any month in our records,” echoing the sentiments of other experts.

The European climate agency said Thursday that last month was the warmest September on record globally and “the most anomalous warm month of any year” in its dataset going back to 1940.

“The month as a whole was around 1.75°C warmer than the September average for 1850-1900, the preindustrial reference period,” the agency noted. “The global temperature for January-September 2023 was 0.52°C higher than average, and 0.05°C higher than the equivalent period in the warmest calendar year (2016).”

Samantha Burgess, Copernicus’ deputy director, said in a statement that “the unprecedented temperatures for the time of year observed in September—following a record summer—have broken records by an extraordinary amount.”

“This extreme month has pushed 2023 into the dubious honor of first place—on track to be the warmest year and around 1.4°C above preindustrial average temperatures,” Burgess added. “Two months out from COP28—the sense of urgency for ambitious climate action has never been more critical.”

(Credit: Copernicus Climate Change Service/ECMWF)
(Credit: Copernicus Climate Change Service/ECMWF)

The new Copernicus data came hours after the release of a United Nations report that called on nations worldwide to end fossil fuel exploration by 2030, warning that countries are not acting with sufficient urgency to rein in planet-heating pollution.

Simon Stiell, the U.N. climate chief, said the report “puts the cards on the table—except this is not a game.”

“We know that we as the global community are not on track towards achieving the long-term goals of the Paris Agreement and that there is a rapidly closing window of opportunity to secure a livable and sustainable future,” said Stiell.

Original article by JAKE JOHNSON republished from Common Dreams under Creative Commons (CC BY-NC-ND 3.0). 

Continue ReadingAfter ‘Mind-Blowing’ September, 2023 Set to Be Hottest Year on Record: EU Climate Agency